Reconstructing Old Tibetan

10.1163/9789004251229_016

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Chapter Summary

This chapter aims to reconstruct the phonetics of the Spoken Old Tibetan. By the way this promises also a help to the solution of the basic questions of the Tibetan orthography. The first group of sources is of course Written Old Tibetan. The orthography sometimes reveals in other cases hides the pronunciation. The inconsequences of the orthography, the possible range of orthographic variants, typical orthographical errors, the various forms of the same proper nouns may offer effective help to the reconstruction of Spoken Old Tibetan. To the second group of sources pertain Tibetan texts or isolated words written with, scripts other than Tibetan. This group is very heterogeneous. Chinese, Khotanese Brahmi, various Turkic scripts, even sources written with the Arabic script preserved Tibetan words. To the third group pertain the foreign words and names written with the tibetan alphabetin a form adapted to the orthographic rules.